Services 2020

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today-perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system-in prison, on probation, or on parole-than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

*I'd agree that futurists talk about what futurist clients want to hear about. Nobody talks about the absolute future, any more than historians would discuss the entirety of all events in all thirteen-point-seven billion years of history.

**Let's intentcast to bootstrap Creative Economy 3.0** What is intentcasting? I came across this concept on Seb Paquet's blog, Emergent Cities. He describes it as follows Interest brings groups together, but intent is what brings teams together to actually get things done. Intentcasting is deceptively simple to describe. It consists in broadcasting your intent to make something happen. That something could be anything: "I want to have a party at my house!" "We want to raise $1,000 for Japan!" "I want this piece of software to exist!" "We want this work of art to exist!" In order for intent to catch on, it has to meet a few conditions: It must describe a promise - a future state of affairs that could conceivably happen, explained in a way that people understand. It must open participation in one or more well-defined ways. It must be expressed in a way that enables it to travel and spread over the communications infrastructure. There must be other people or groups out there who resonate with the intent and can get excited enough to connect.

To explore the iKnow system please use the top navigation menu to access the iScan - to monitor and search WI-WE issues, the iDelphi - to assess and prioritise WI-WE issues, the iLibrary - to share innovation and foresight and horizon scanning (FHS) documents, the iCommunity - to engage and network innovation and FHS people, the iNews - to feature selected contributions to iKnow's FHS systems, and the iOracle - to map FHS practices, players and outcomes - in collaboration with the mapping activities of the European Foresight Platform. To learn about the iKnow project's objectives and background, please click here .

In the first years of the 21st century, our capacities for imagining new realities have proved inadequate. From Madrid to London, Bali to Mumbai, from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans to the tsunami's devastation all around the Indian Ocean, to the most recent financial crisis, the alarms went unheeded until after disaster had struck. Now, as the first decade of the century has drawn to a close, its many shocks make plain that we are living in a world with greater potential for surprise, uncertainty, and threats to resilience. In a time of poorly understood interacting causes and consequences, we require new habits of thinking, new approaches to assessment, and new ways of engaging with the world. Emerging is a world filled with just as much opportunity as risk, but seeing both of those forces and appreciating their interrelatedness requires new lenses and an unflagging awareness of diverse perspectives. It means investing all of our energies to profoundly challenge the status quo.

Will Asia lead the world in green technologies and in the political-economic transition to sustainability? Can Asia bury past conflicts and create stronger regional institutions including perhaps, step by step, an Asian Union? In what ways could Asia's traditional cultures - Islamic, Tantric, Taoist, Confucian, Buddhist and Vedic - be resources in inventing an alternative more hybrid cultures?

KOSMOS is an ancient Greek term meaning the harmony and beauty of the universe wherein all parts have their place within the Whole. It signifies humanity's alignment with the unchanging ground of being and the evolutionary organic forces of Nature. The integral approach of Kosmos Associates embraces body, mind, soul and spirit evolving in consciousness, cultures, worldviews, institutions and nations toward a new civilization.

best list of futurist blogs I've ever seen! 

Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main effect on the economy will be broadly lower prices and less need for employment.

FORGET using passwords to log on to your computer, needing touch screens to navigate on your smartphone or paying expensive energy bills; in the future your daily activities will create all the energy you need to power your house, biometrics will unlock your devices, and your mind will be capable of controlling them.

ONE of humanity's ultimate dreams, to peer into the future, may be moving a step closer with a controversial €1 billion ($1.3bn) EU plan to recreate the entire world in a computer system. The Living Earth Simulator project would take the vast streams of data pouring into the internet, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to dry-as-dust government statistics, and try to spot the economic and social trends that will shape the future.

Everstate is an imaginary state in our contemporary world of the beginning of the 21st century created to identify and imagine various futures. It will be used to represent all states and each state. Everstate is thus an ideal-type state …

Thought leaders in the field - including Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio, Bill McKibben, Witold Rybczynski and Jay Oglivy - will kick-start the launch by blogging about what "prevailing" means to them. Readers will be encouraged to become authors and help direct the discussion in groups devoted to everything from "Creating Stronger, Faster Communities" and "Human Enhancement" to "Revolutionizing Learning" and "Foresight - How Can We Think Critically About the Future?" "Prevailproject.org will be a place for everybody from my mother to technologists inventing the future to grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time: How are the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions changing human nature, and how can we shape our own futures, toward our own ends, rather than being the pawns of these explosively powerful technologies?" said Joel Garreau, the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and director of The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures.

A Silicon Valley startup that collates threats has quietly become indispensable to the U.S. intelligence community

Cool money graph