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What will happen in 2012? In the spirit of the aphorism "The future is not something to be predicted, it's something to be achieved," let me suggest 20 transformations (which Reuters will publish in four groups of five). We need to make progress on these issues now to prevent next year from being a complete disaster.

With the world networked on an unprecedented scale, and the global population hitting 7 billion only weeks ago, we are living in a uniquely interconnected era, creating new opportunites and dependencies. It's the result of millenia of exploration, travel, exploitation, and innovation, and the Anthropocene, meaning "the new human-dominated period of the Earth's history," is a term coined in 2000 to describe this epoch. A Cartography of the Anthropocene is an effort by global education organization Globaïa to map this epoch, illustrating the various ways that global humanity connects and is interdependent.

"Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. "

"With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix and match these "DNA parts" in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals."

"We invite you to explore new "Seeds of Change" offers for the sustainability of local and global good causes."

"a place where project managers and individual programmers can hire other programmers and raise funds to make sure that their projects keep moving forward. Gun.io is a new kind of labor market - a community where talent is rewarded."

"Open source software is not only free from license restriction; it is also free to be used as a basis for innovation, allowing custom solutions for the unique context of specific issues faced by developing nations. But for many nations, software is not enough."