Future

Please see below selected forecasts for 2024:

According to the World Bank, more people now live inside this circle than outside of it - see @WorldBank pic.twitter.com/iN1gDHaFiV.

Many are imagining, some even planning for, the coming of the "singularity". Some are for, some against, many others sceptical that it could ever arrive.

Ray Kurzweil, who inter alia works on Google's machine learning project, predicts that by 2029, humans will be extending their lives considerably or even indefinitely. He also believes the human brain could be enhanced by tiny robotic implants that connect to cloud-based computer networks to give us 'God-like' abilities.

2015 saw major global trends, from the Greek sovereign debt crisis and the Chinese stock market meltdown, to the refugee exodus and of course the global terrorist attacks. And it was a record year for deal-making as business confidence recovered. So what will 2016 bring? Throughout January and February Halcyon put together this evolving index of significant forecasts for 2016.

META-LEVEL FORECASTS

There is a growing trend towards self-tracking and the rise of the "quantified self", suddenly made easier by the ubiquity of embedded sensors.

However, Evgeny Morozov warned during a fascinating recent address that those of us who would refuse to self-track when the majority of people do self-track may be treated with suspicion. The assumption would not be that you refuse to self-track because you want to exercise autonomy or you fear about your privacy, but rather because you are not walking enough or you are not a safe driver or you eat too much fat.

You sit at the table in the dim light at the border of dawn with your past looking back at you. You reach out but your past withdraws. “You cannot touch me,” it says, “I am always out of reach.” You take back your hand and sit facing your past. You ask why it is here. “I am always with you,” your past says. It gets up and walks around behind you- you turn your head but your past moves to the corner of your eye — a shadow glimpsed, always elusive. You sense its presence behind you, growing older moment by moment. When you look back across the table your future sits there with its back to you. You cannot see its face - http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2010/04/25/links-and-tweets-of-the-month-ap…

To be a prospectivist, or futurist, you have to be a bit cheeky, nonconformist, and multidisciplinary - Michel Godet

These days the present feels wrong. These days I feel wistful for the future, for moments of greater chaos when either we or our chlidren's children will look back and laugh aghast at what we chose today to dramatise, at our naive concerns about the world, at our tragicomic headlines (so quaint! so misguided!) and fear - Siona van Dijk http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2010/07/11/links-and-tweets-of-the-month-ju…