Future

Please see below selected forecasts for 2024:

Halcyon curates the most significant future-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with future-related challenges.

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.