Future Files

Future Planning

Forecasting the future is impossible; making specific predictions, absurd. However, to learn all you can and plan for change, you must look beyond the limits of your discipline and short-term goals. Consider a broad host of factors, and let your forecasting influence your present.

Five trends will “shape the next 50 years.” First, much of the industrialized world’s population is getting older. Second, political and economic power will move from the West to the East, and military power will follow. Third, “global connectivity” will continue: More people will go online, and economies will become more interwoven. Fourth, a quartet of technologies – “Genetics, Robotics, Internet and Nanotechnology” (GRIN) – will create “self-replicating machines,” artificial intelligence and genetically modified people. All these trends will interact with the fifth trend, the increasing importance of ecological concerns.

How Lives Will Change

Though broad trends will sweep across the globe, people will not lead uniform lives. Instead, they will inhabit “multiple futures.” Societies will polarize, pulling people in opposite directions. Globalization will spread...