IFTF 10-Year Forecast

I'm in Berkeley at the 30th annual 10-year forecast retreat by the Institute For The Future. I feel very honored and delighted to have been invited; it's limited to 100 attendees from a variety of disciplines, industries and countries.

The topic is the grassroots economy; throughout the day we'll be hearing from luminaries like Steven Weber (author of Success of Open Source), Joi Ito, Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs) and more.

Last night was the overview of the 10-year forecast, which included the prediction of hostile environments (ie. climate changes and urbanization) and a really cool concept called the bio-quantum paradigm (a fancy term for how we'll adapt to an overload of technology). I'll write more on that later! Right now I'm headed to breakfast. Stay tuned for some fascinating ideas...

Comments

[Yvonne DiVita]

I am soooooo jealous that you got to go! But, SOOOOooo proud that you're there. If not me, then...who better? Great going, Jennifer. Keep us informed. Never mind the singularity...women are changing things so fast now, we've already fallen into the singularity, if-- jbr is describing it accurately, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. Nonetheless, make sure you get out in time to report back to the rest of us...we're waiting with our ears to the keyboard.

[jbr]

sorry, i am on a roll now...sliding rapidly toward the singularity...

"ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace"

the above quote is the verbal description of the blogosphere....on Sifry's alerts, his data supports this comment.

this is only on a human scale...there is also the very real capability of machine to machine sharing via RSS. i have been in discussions on how to have machines pass information via RSS.

thinking a bit further down the road, with the advent of more capable robots, they too could become to communicate via RSS...it will be a relatively trivial matter of programming that capability into their software. install wireless capability into the robot, teach them to "blog" info from one machine to another and we get much closer to the singularity.

in fact, are we very far removed from robotic sentries? via a wireless RSS feed, they will patrol a perimeter and report to the next sentry on data found during their "nightly rounds". also, they could also quickly relay data regarding a moving intruder to the next sentry in order to facilitate a capture.....

so, in my mind, we are not too far removed from this event described by Vinge. Jennifer, keep your eye out for RSS enabled robots.....

[jbr]

for other people like me who don't know what a "singularity" is....here is a bit of education.

"a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules"

"human affairs, as we know them, could not continue"

talk about change!! whoa, dude!

from the excellent 1993 abstract by Vernor Vinge

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html

[Johnnie Moore]

Hope you don't fall into a singularity :)

[jbr]

this sounds like an interesting event, but how accurate have the 30 years of 10 year forecasts been?

for example, 5 years ago, were personal publishing webpages predicted to be a major upheaval in business/publishing/communicating?

certainly, it's difficult to predict the future, but after 30 years of practice, how often do these prediction conferences produce an accurate result?

if no one has asked a question similar to this, please ask for me. thanks. looking forward to reading many posts about the conference.