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Op-Ed: Assessing the future in a reliable way: Elizabeth Florescu (Includes interview)

They focus on exploring the political, socio-economic and cultural trends regarding the world’s future as it emerges from present conditions. Elizabeth Florescu is such a futurist. She has worked as the Director of Research of The Millennium Project organization since 1997.

The Millennium Project aims to improve humanity’s ability to build a better future by making better decisions today. It does so by creating cutting edge futures research instruments, such as the “global futures collective intelligence system.” The Project insists it does not work on behalf of a government, ideology or issue. It publishes a “State of the Future” report once a year. As the Director of Research, Elizabeth Florescu identifies key study domains of the report and supervises the research and publication of the report. She is also focused on continuing to attract top experts from around the world to contribute their research to the collection of the needed data.

Marking the 18th edition, the “2015-16 State of the Future” was published in August 2015. Apart from highlighting current challenges and opportunities, it also recommends actions and policies that could improve humanity’s future. One of the key challenges analyzed in the report, highlighted by Ms. Florescu during our interview, was the alarming rise of transnational organized crime (TOC), which, if not checked, will control the future. At the moment, TOC is expected to generate more income per year than all military budgets combined. In addition to TOC, the de facto establishment of a corporatocracy poses a substantial threat to democracy, development and security, largely unacknowledged by the global public and the media.

Another issue underscored in the report is the emergence of synthetic biology, which focuses focuses on the design and construction of new artificial biological organisms and designs, as well as the restructuring of existing biological systems. In the near future, producing new genetic code will become as easy as writing software code. Synthetic biology will be used in a wide range of fields, from creating plants that produce hydrogen to microprobes to eat plaque in the brain. The rise of synthetic biology will be enabled by the increasing accuracy of 3D and 4D printing, which are already producing biological organs. Further synergies will take place with artificial intelligence, robotics, and drones, among others. According to the report, the rapid pace of technological innovation and integration over the next 25 years will make the past 25 seem substantially slower. The key concern lies in ensuring that these developments are ethically used to benefit the human condition and global development rather than threaten it.

Apart from highlighting TOC and the emerging new technologies, this year’s “State of the Future” explores 13 other global challenges and their respective regional implications. Of greatest concern is the increasing lack of access to water, which predictably will lead to a rise in conflicts over reduced resources, and the disparate income gap between the rich and the poor, which calls for the transition to ethical market economies globally. Regarding the latter issue, if, in 2014, 80 billionaires’ wealth equaled that of the bottom 50 percent of society, in 2016, Oxfam, an international confederation of organizations working to combat poverty and injustice in the world, predicts the richest one percent will own more than the rest of the world combined.

In our interview, Ms. Florescu mentioned that, in deciding the report’s topics, the team weighs the relevant politics, the potential impact and the key decision-making partners. In order to avoid adopting a Western perspective and focusing on Western-centric topics, the Millennium Project works with self-organized groups around the world, called Nodes. These comprise institutions and organizations who are conducting research on behalf of the Project or contributing autonomous research to support it. One of the Nodes’ key responsibilities is to disseminate questionnaires and reports, conduct interviews, special research and trainings, if need be. The Nodes also identify emerging global issues and opportunities that could be considered for new studies, conduct special studies as part of The Millennium Project, and propose potential new methods for developing futures research in general.

Highlighting the fact that humanity has the resources necessary to address the issues it is currently facing, Ms. Florescu emphasized that the “State of the Future” goes beyond simply revealing the main problems faced by humanity. It calls on leaders to take action and implement transnational strategies to solve these substantial global challenges. In order to create necessary strategies, the report suggests that more comprehensive and integrated understandings of mega-problems and opportunities need to be developed and implemented.

Recognizing the increase in terrorism and lone wolf phenomena as serious future threats, Ms. Florescu co-authored the book “Lone Wolf Terrorism Prospects and Potential Strategies to Address the Threat”, published in 2015. The book discusses the increasing danger of SIMAD (single individual(s) massively destructive), while also assessing potential new methods for timely detection and identification of people with possible mal-intent.

Hopefully, guided by this vast global futures research, and with timely intervention, humanity ensure a bright future for all, rather than continue to recklessly rush to its destruction.

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