One of the handy critiques of futures forecasts past is that often the exciting, liberating, “promised” technology never arrives. The “poster boy” for futurist disappointment has for many years been the jetpack. Initially conceived in the 1940s and 1950s, surely, we should have this thing by now, right?

Well here it is, from Jetpack Aviation:

And if you’re anything like me, you want one.

Now!

Here’s an interesting, if not very in-depth, segment on robots from an AOL series called The Future Starts Here. The Future Starts Here is the work of internet pioneer and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain and is a show that seeks to “explore what it means to be human as we rush head first into the future.” In the following episode, Shlain is joined by her husband, Cal Berkeley professor of robotics Ken Goldberg.

Check it out:

Very clever visuals and some really easy-to-understand, perhaps simplistic discussion. But okay, what’s interesting here?

Well, first of all, Goldberg and Shlain make the point that the general emphasis of robotics is increasingly on robots that provide personal assistance to humans. “Robots that are more like companions than tools” is the way Shlain puts it. And I think that it’s becoming apparent, as robot development advances, that the killer app for robotics is social robotics in all its various forms. I’ll even go as far as to say the killer app for artificial intelligence is social robotics. People are going to pay more and more in the future for truly smart machines to help them with their lives and to generally keep them company.

The second interesting point here is the “cloud brain” idea. The cloud is enabling robotics, as all the memory and processing power does not need to necessarily reside in an individual robot. The tremendous opportunity to leverage the cloud and general internet of things technologies is driving a new wave of robots in development and commercialization. Aldebaran‘s robot Pepper, as an example, uses a “cloud AI” application to store and process data, to in effect “learn.”

Finally, there’s Goldberg’s point that robots are interesting because they make clear the gap between what machines can do and what humans can do. To put it another way, how far our technology lags behind nature. Or in Goldberg’s words, robots remind us “how amazing we are.” Well, it’s nice to have a little species pride, of course, but that gap seems likely to close more and more in coming years. Will we still love robots then? I think it all depends on how good they become as companions.

Before January gets away, I feel obligated to look forward and mention a few changes I see in the world in the next 10 years. These may not be the biggest or the most dangerous changes coming, but I believe this is a range of changes that are likely to have an impact:

1. Automation of Work — The continued automation of various labor roles will continue to grow, improving productivity and displacing human labor short-term. Depending on the severity of the changes (in terms of structural unemployment), there may need to be policy changes, like the institution of universal basic income, in order to maintain social stability. Positive outcomes could include a future of abundance and the diversion of human energies in interesting new directions; negative outcomes could include a deeply divided and conflicted society of haves and have-nots.

Related: Universal Basic Income and Robots.

2. Global Economic Restructuring — The state of the global economy is unsustainable because of various factors including massive debt, volatile financial markets, and poorly integrated global economies. The current cycle of boom and bust will only increase in amplitude over time until it could possibly tear the world apart. Positive outcomes of facing this problem might be stability through large-scale financial restructuring (including debt write-downs and new regulatory approaches); negative outcomes include a massive global economic crash that impoverishes everyone. Either way, we’re likely to have to face the music and restructure it soon.

Related: McKinsey on Global Debt.

3. Our Robotic Friends — Further growth in machine learning and artificial intelligence will facilitate the growth of social robotics and artificial personal assistants. Currently, human beings in the developed world are being aided by early machine intelligence in the form of Siri, Cortana, Google search engine, and various shopping recommendation engines. Also, social robots are available now that provide guidance, comfort, advice, friendship, and even companionship. Once AI researchers realize that many humans are lazy and lonely, and that social robotics is the killer app for AI, the field will blossom even further. Positive outcomes include various social and personal benefits (less depression, more efficiency) and the birth of many additional AI applications; a negative outcome might be the fears about AI taking over coming true.

Related: 2016 Will Be the Year for Social Robotics.

4. The Collapse of Geo Petro Politics — The emergence of efficiency and alternatives in energy will liberate us from the old fossil fuel regime, and improve our environment to some extent, but the geopolitical world is likely to go through tremendous change. Regimes will tumble, alliances will shift, the balance of power in the world will be recast. Negative outcomes include widespread conflict and suffering; positive outcomes include the opportunity to reframe global cooperation in a new light and with new objectives. Need some visionary leadership here, for certain.

Related: Oil Prices are Transforming Global Politics

5. Nomads, Immigrants and Global Citizens — Human displacement will continue to grow, both as people flee conflicts or failed states and as people pursue work and other opportunities across the globe. The rise of the “digital nomad” will increase as well. Borders will have to come down to some degree, and citizenship could possibly become more fluid. International law will be put to task as criminals will move more freely, as will terrorists, which are some of the negative possible outcomes; on the positive side, people could become more free to move about and find employment or other opportunities across the globe.

Related: Immigrant Crisis Impacts in 2016

This list could go on, of course, but these are my five big ones.

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Note: I first developed this list as part of a World Futures course in the University of Houston Strategic Foresight program.

Note: This entry is the first in a series of book reviews on works of use or interest for futurists, including books that address the future in general, specific future domains, or futurist practice and/or methodology. 

Adam Kahane’s 2012 work, Transformative Scenario Planning, presents a variant of Shell’s adaptive scenario planning methodology that seeks to “construct scenarios not only to understand the future but also to influence it” (Kahane xv). Throughout the book, Kahane outlines the genesis of the Transformative Scenario Planning methodology, details the process steps, and provides several specific case studies from his experiences in applying and refining the process.

As emerges from the very first case study, that of the Mont Fleur project that Kahane led in South Africa at the time of the end of apartheid, the development of transformative scenario planning is designed for specific situations very different from its adaptive ancestor. In Shell’s adaptive scenario planning, the organization generally takes a reactive stance in that it views the environment as something to which it must adapt to the best of its ability, for the most positive outcome. Transformative scenario planning, on the other hand, looks at situations, contexts, or environments where several actors are stuck, to use Kahane’s word, and must work together to find their way out. Finding the way out means transforming the environment, not just adapting to it.

Specifically, transformative scenario planning, according to Kahane, is useful to people who are in the following situation:

1. “These people see the situation they are in as unacceptable, unstable, or unsustainable” (16).
2. “These people cannot transform their situation on their own or by working only with their friends and colleagues” (16).
3. “These people cannot transform their situation directly” (17).

The transformative scenario planning methodology assumes that a facilitated scenario creation process that brings together these stakeholders in the situation described above can help them transform their situation. Most of Kahane’s work involved political situations where getting representatives from various factions together can facilitate solutions and break through barriers.

The big main idea here is that if you can get the right people together to build models of what could happen in their shared situation, you can empower them to actually shape their situation, and thus their collective future.

The method here is to get relevant actors together to create shared scenarios though a series of workshops. The goals are to transform the understandings, relationships, intentions, and actions of the actors in the situation (Kahane 18).

It requires the following components:

1. “A whole-system team of insightful, influential and interested actors” (19).
2. “A strong container within which these actors can transform their understandings, relationships, and intentions” (20).
3. “A rigorous scenario-planning process” (20).

Further, there are five steps in the process:

1. “Convene a team from across the whole system” (23).
2. “Observe what is happening” (23).
3. “Construct Stories around what could happen” (23).
4. “Discover what can and must be done” (23).
5. “Act to transform the system” (23).

The first step involves starting with a convening team of 5 to 10 people, who select up to 35 leading actors for the workshops. The second, third, and fourth steps involve facilitated work over the course of three to four workshops over three to four days. Finally, the scenario team works on the fifth step in a six to eight month period after the workshops.

The book contains many case studies, including some that were unsuccessful, but the Mont Fleur scenario from South Africa is perhaps the most important one, as it initiated the transformative scenario process. In this example, Kahane was asked by stakeholders in South Africa, at the end of the apartheid era, to facilitate a process to help the government and society move forward. Of particular concern was the integration of black political parties that were previously illegal. The team there came up with the following four scenarios, which informed much work afterward:

1. Ostrich — No negotiated settlement.
2. Lame Duck — No rapid and decisive transition
3. Icarus — Government’s policies are unsustainable.
4. Flight of the Flamingos — All items positive (Kahane 9).

Another example is from work in Zimbabwe, where issues of economic development and governance were parsed among stakeholders who were at various impasses. These scenarios, built on a 2×2 matrix with poverty vs. well-being on one axis and connected vs. disconnected government on the other, are colorful and memorable in name:

1. The Chameleon (Connected government, poverty)
2. The Stone People (Connected, well-being
3. The Vulture State (Disconnected, poverty)
4. Stimela/Locomotive (Disconnected, well-being) (Kahane 54).

Other examples included parties after the Guatemalan civil war, aboriginal issues in Australia, and more.

In general, this is a useful book in that it clearly outlines a process and methodology for doing a certain kind of consulting. While the case studies tend to involve very similar situations, almost all of which are political and related to developing countries, there are lessons to learn from the way the author applies his methodology. Specifically, Kahane’s emphasis on finding flexible and creative ways to engage stakeholders in their different points of view, such as taking field trips or “learning journeys,” or encouraging them to interact outside the formal workshop exercises, are particularly inspiring.

Of additional interest, and an idea I think all futurists should always keep in mind for their scenario workshop methodologies, is this idea of creating the container (or productive space) for the workshop. Kahane explains and emphasizes this well, and points to the key components: 1) the “political positioning of the exercise;” 2) the “psychosocial conditions of the work;” and 3) the “the physical locations of the meetings” (Kahane 20).

Another aspect of considerable potential value is Kahane’s emphasis on creating metaphors for the scenarios that emerge from the process. Some of the metaphors are engaging and because of their evocative nature, they tended to stick in the minds of the participants, becoming ideas that lived far beyond the initial scenario exercise. Several examples are noted above.

In conclusion, the book is a great, easy, short read that provides not only a process for scenario development but that is itself a case study in a futurist developing and refining his own methodology to largely great effect in a particular specialty area. The political nature of Kahane’s case studies may not appeal to everyone, and the method discussion is rather thin, but again a professional futurist or student should be able to extract value here.

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Kahane, A. (2012). Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Here’s a fairly comprehensive and engaging cultural trends forecast for the coming year, courtesy of Sparks & Honey, a self-styled cultural agency.

Flip through it and you’ll find lots of fascinating stuff, a veritable catalog of emerging ideas, practices and attitudes. I can personally say I’ve encountered many of these items for the first time in the past 30 days, including adult coloring books, fan activism, mood marketing, and more.

Of course, it all begs additional questions. What larger trends are at work here? What connects these items? How are they being combined? How could they be combined? How long will these trends last? What might they evolve into?

Great stuff, anyway, and rich food for thought in the new year.

Please join the World Future Society Arizona Chapter for our October featured presentation:

Today’s Gadgets & Emerging Technology Innovations
with Mark Goldstein, President, International Research Center

Mark Goldstein, President of International Research Center, will showcase the latest and greatest new tech gadgets, discoveries, and inventions for addressing quality of life and societal issues, as well as others for business effectiveness, personal productivity, and just plain fun. He’ll share a forward-looking view of emerging tech innovations illuminating what they portent for individuals, projecting evolving market opportunities, and gauging the impact on society at large from the present on into our future. Contemporary science fiction and that of the past often influences and anticipates the technological advances we see today and what we hope and fear for tomorrow. Come share a rollicking ride through the technology roller coaster of our times.

Please join us!

When: Wednesday, October 21, 2015 from 6:30-8:30 PM

Where: Scottsdale Civic Center Library

RSVP here.

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Speaker Bio: Mark Goldstein is President of International Research Center, providing consulting, custom research, and strategic support for business, legal and public policy clients across a variety of disciplines and arenas since 1992. IRC concentrates on clients’ needs in the complex worlds of telecommunications, information technology, eCommerce, eContent, eLearning, the Internet, biotechnology, cleantech/greentech, and other high-tech domains by harnessing global information resources for informed decision making. Also, he is an Independent Agent for GSV Sustainability Partners, a transformative finance company that provides full funding for sustainable energy and conservation projects under a shared savings model.

Mark is a technophile and technology visionary, activist, advisor, and entrepreneur with extensive experience and connections throughout myriad technology sectors. He currently serves on the Board and Executive Committees of both the Arizona Technology Council and Arizona Telecom & Information Council, as well as being deeply involved in the Arizona BioIndustry Association, the Arizona Energy Consortium, the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association, and participates in many other regional, national, and international economic development and policy groups, as well as being a frequent speaker and trainer.

If you’re in Arizona and interested in futures topics,  I’d like to invite you to join the WFS Arizona chapter for our August meeting. I’m very excited about this month’s topic and speaker, and I hope you can join us.

On August 26, 2015, our featured presentation topic and speaker will be as follows:

Natasha Vita-More on Transhumanism

If you’re unfamiliar with Natasha’s work, here’s her bio:

I recently joined over 2,000 scientists, researchers, businesspeople, and other informed and interested parties in signing an open letter against the development of autonomous weapons. Sponsored by the Future of Life Institute, an organization dedicated to “safeguarding life and developing positive visions of the future,” this open letter proposes “a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”

Since its release, the open letter achieved its aim of raising the issue publicly and stimulating awareness and open debate about the state of the technology and accompanying ethical issues.

Here’s CNN’s report on the issue and the open letter:

It’s important to realize of course that this issue didn’t just come out of nowhere. A part of the incremental march of technology has led us to this latest inflection point: AI technology is becoming slowly more sophisticated, and the drone culture of remote warfare more embedded in military thinking, that it’s an inevitable intersection of trends pointing to the future.

The tech signatories of this FLI Open Letter, then, are simply bringing to light and providing support for an issue which many concerned parties have discussing for a couple of years. There is an active non-profit dedicated to the issue, the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, and last year, the Red Cross held an expert meeting on the subject. You can read the Red Cross’s report here: 4221-002-autonomous-weapons-systems-full-report.

It seems like a no-brainer to suggest a ban on the development of “killer robots,” but like so many technological issues, it’s complicated.

Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Evan Ackerman provides more than a contrarian view when he writes that We Should Not Ban Killer Robots. His excellent point is simply that it’s pointless to ban them because “no letter, UN declaration, or even a formal ban ratified by multiple nations is going to prevent people from being able to build autonomous, weaponized robots.” Instead, Ackerman argues, we need to accept that it will happen and work not on bans, but the technology to instill ethical behavior in autonomous weapons. To quote, “What we really need, then, is a way of making autonomous armed robots ethical, because we’re not going to be able to prevent them from existing.”

In a remote way, Ackerman’s point is very similar to the one I made in a previous post, where I argued that AI is likely inevitable, but that, should it arrive in our world, its character and use would depend a great deal on the conditions of our global society when it arrives. To quote that piece, “my assumption then is that, given the way the [governments and societies] work today, and given all the implications of the factors of spying and nation-state competition/warfare, machine super-intelligence [or AI] would end up in the hands of governments as a military and/or intelligence tool.”

As I argued then, it’s not enough to work on ethical or friendly AI — we should do that, sure — but it’s not enough. Rather, we need to work on the ethical context in which AI will emerge. To quote again, our best hope of preventing the weaponization of full AI “goes beyond ensuring that the AI we create is ‘friendly.’ Rather, we have to make sure that machine super-intelligence [or AI] does not arrive before we change the context of our world.”

And by change, I mean improve. The context of our world needs to become more moral and informed, more cooperative and less warlike, in order to avoid the potential dangers of weaponized AI. It needs to be a world in which we are less interested in weaponizing AI or anything else in the first place. It sounds utopian, sure, but I think such efforts as the FLI’s open letter is a small example of an emergent behavior in the right spirit — people connecting to face an issue, communicating a position on it, and inviting discussion.

That’s the right stuff, in my opinion. So to me, it’s worth signing.

If you agree, add your signature here.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a robot named hitchBOT thumbing his way across America. As I wrote then, hitchBOT’s plan was to travel, take photos, and post to social media, but the crux of the journey apparently involved interaction and trust with humans.

Here’s hitchBOT starting his American odyssey:

hitchBOT had already successfully made it across Canada and Germany, but guess what? Two weeks was all it took for hitchBOT’s American adventure to meet an untimely end.

Apparently, today, hitchBOT was found largely destroyed on the side of a road in Philadelphia. Read about it here and here.

Here’s a sad photo of the scene:

hitchBOT, who again had planned to hitchhike all the way to California, only made it this far:

I won’t moralize too much here about hitchBOT’s fate and what it says about our culture in the United States. Yes, it’s tragic and pointless as these things go, but if it was truly an experiment, among other things, that involved human trust and human-machine interaction, it’s fair to draw whatever conclusions are fair to draw.

I think it’s obvious hitchBOT was perceived (and treated) by his assailants as an object, not a subject, and furthermore, in many news reports, the word “vandalized” was used, a word that certainly means violence against objects, not subjects. Will there be a future where machine subjectivity is sufficiently advanced that an act like this could be called murder? Where is the intelligence/personality threshold at which smart machines win some measure of respect as subjects? In other words, where on the spectrum of machine intelligence will human attitudes change? Will it require full AI and/or consciousness, or some sufficiently developed point along the way? Or will human attitudes ever change?

Finally, I saw one person on twitter comment, “America, this is why the world hates you,” but I’ll go ahead and add, “Humans, maybe this is why we should worry about SkyNet.” And things like autonomous weapons.

RIP hitchBOT.

At the Rise conference this weekend in Hong Kong, Google for Work president Amit Singh noted the coming end of the desktop computer, and thereby the end of the traditional work desk, as more and more people and technology become mobile. According to coverage in TNV, Singh said workers are “increasingly getting more done on mobile devices. In the future, you’ll be spending even more time on them, away from your desk.”

Further, with its acquisition of machine learning firm Deepmind, Singh indicated Google is working on AI assistants that will further facilitate the liberation of workers from desks. To quote Singh’s talk at the Rise conference:

“We’ve been thinking a lot about the the increasing importance of mobility at work. We’re currently taking traditional data and tools and unlocking them from your desk. But creating an intelligent assistant that goes where you do and helps you out by surfacing data when you need it, in context, cognitive in real-time — I believe that’s the future.”

That the future of digital communications and productivity is mobile is no newsflash; it’s a trend that’s been building for some time. There will be more and more opportunities for remote and place-independent work, and more tools like AI assistants available to remote workers.

What’s interesting now is the emergence of the cultural corollary: the rise of the “digital nomad” as a distinctive lifestyle choice and self-identification for (at present) mostly young, educated, tech-savvy people. To the point, also occurring this weekend was DNX 2015, the Global Digital Nomad Conference in Berlin. According to its web site, DNX sees remote work as a kind of moral revolution, and the organizers go so far as encouraging people to quit conventional jobs and join the nomadic horde:

“DNX is changing lives and inspiring people to start to work and live location independent. Our vision is that more and more people live their lives free and self-determined. We strongly believe that meeting other cultures makes us personally richer and the world a better place. Everybody can find his or her passion, live their dreams and work self-determined. DNX is part of the freedom revolution, in that people take ownership of their jobs, time and life. People quit their conventional jobs to reclaim the freedom to design their own lives.”

Here also is a video clip of the founders of DNX talking about DNX:

In addition to technology tools and at least one conference, there are other services (some in development) that support digital nomads. Sharing economy stalwarts such as uber and airbnb come immdiately to mind as nomad-friendly, but there are many more. One interesting example is Nomad House, “a housing solution that offers flexible living arrangements while bringing together great people; to stimulate ideas, incubate projects, and create the best possible home; in the best locations in the world.” With Nomad House, apparently, you subscribe to digital nomad community housing credits that you can consume in locations around the world.

All of this labor freedom seems presently restricted to a limited set of high-tech skills and trades, of course, but as this lifestyle movement grows in possibility, and the tools to support it improve, I predict that we will all become more place-independent and thus potentially nomadic. Ironically, I think corporations will have already embraced it. Governments, on the other hand, may need to adapt to millions or even billions of fully employed wanderers crossing and recrossing international borders, working for various companies in various countries, banking, shopping, and investing outside of traditional rooted-national-citizen patterns.