Pamphlet

I started this blog on 7 April 2009. It may look as a very diverse set of blog-posts, but there is plan behind all this.

As a teaser, i am publishing today my Pamphlet. More to follow in the days/weeks to follow. Let me know what you think.

“Over the last 20 years we have witnessed a fantastic growth of wealth and technologies. ICT technologies have started permeating our daily lives. Medical sciences and biotechnologies have increased the average age significantly. Other technologies (Nanotechnologies, AI, Robotics, etc) have kick-started. “

But, since the last couple of years, we witness the breakdown of a number of core systems:

– Our worldwide Financial system is going through a “meltdown”. The old game of greed is coming to an end. Trust is becoming value number 1.

– Ecological, ethnological and demographical shocks are turning our systems upside-down. Green and Energy are now in the mainstream

– The East/West shock: economic powers shifting from the Western world to the new economies of APAC and BRIC+ countries.

– New forms of communication via the internet (blogs, wikis, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Netlog, etc) propose a new paradigm with respect of privacy.

“All this fundamental changes give us a feeling of discomfort, disorientation, confusion, loss of control. Although our “collective intelligence” indicates that our old models do not apply anymore, our “hardware” seems not to have followed. We have not adapted the way how we are organized hierarchically, how we look at governance. Our traditional “system”-thinking got stuck and did not follow our “collective intelligence”

On the other hand a set of new systems and tools are building up:

– Barack Obama describes it as the ‘audacity of hope’; innovators, planners, academics and authors are referring to dreamtelligence as a new, vital, and visionary way to use play, fantasy, dream-thinking and innovation to kick-start ideas and stimulate community engagement.

– A fantastic call for and revival of authenticity for ourselves and our leaders. Having true leaders: with charisma, attraction, integrity, and authenticity.

– The Net.Generation (now young adults between 15-30 years old) have grown up as digital natives. They will be tomorrow’s leaders. What THEY think will co-form our future. Future will not be invented by today’s generation. This Net-Generation lives differently. They are “wired” differently. For them multitasking (multi-window chatting, gaming at the same time while listening music, looking up information on the internet, being mobile, etc are very common. They also think differently (deeper and more authentic): they have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective and civic responsibility

– Our technological revolution has just started.

o Today our technologists are capable of breeding a human ear in their labs. We are now in a position to create and grow cells, tissues and bodies.

o Artificial Intelligence is back: by 2030 our computers will be able to think, be self-learning, self-healing , some will be able to have a consciousness.

o Self-learning robots will soon go mainstream. Mercedes and BMW have already now cars in the pipeline for 2012 that can drive fully automatically, better than a human being

o The emergence of Google and the “Global Brain”. The internet today is already a tremendous source of information. Today’s search experience will pale compared to the mechanisms we’ll have in 20 years. All knowledge will be available anywhere, anytime, wireless, via brain-implants.

o Social networking is already revolutionalizing the way people and companies are communicating. Interesting to note that these Technologies let us evolve again from a system-to-system communication towards human-human communication.

o Today you can order your personal DNA Gnome sequence in the USA for only 399$. The company doing this is a Google backed start-up. Think DNA in the cloud, with DNA comparisons between ancestors, relationships, etc.

o Brain-wave helmets and chip-implants will give humans better sensors. By 2030 we will see the emergence of “superhumans”. In such dramatically changed context, what will make us “human” ?

o A lot of these future scenarios are described in Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” concept. This is the moment when man and machine will truly blend. Kurzweil claims this will happen around the year 2030.

And the pace of all these technological innovations just goes on in a very exponential way. In the next 20 years we will witness technology breakthroughs that will mean the tenfold of what we have seen the last 20 years.

“All these evolutions call for a re-thinking of our value-compass for the future. We must carefully analyze and think-through on how all this will influence the way we will and want to live and work in the future. What sort of life-quality we aim for. What the socio-economic impact of all this may be. How we want education to be organized. Where we still can and want to influence. “