World Future 2009 is in Transition
Last weekend I was at the WorldFuture 2009 in Chicago, invited to speak on “Me the Media”. The night before my presentation I made a terrible mistake: I took the conference book and began reading “Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World”
Then I couldn’t sleep any more, and I wasn’t the only one. Don Tapscott, who was speaking at the conference too, was up at 5 am and took this picture. I decided to cut/paste it into my presentation. A good sleep and future thinking just doesn’t go together I guess.
When you run down on resources, you need to be more resourcefull
A nice quote to start the conference book, but shortly after it becomes ultimate clear that the crisis we are dealing with is nothing we’ve experienced ever before. Tapscott calls it “the punctuation point“. In our new research we talk about “reboot” for the transition that is needed. Maybe Reboot isn’t the right metaphor, at least we don’t want to suggest that we can restart the old system again. We need a new one. Umair Haque calls it “constructive capitalism”
Penny For Your Thoughts - Umair Haque from Sander Duivestein on Vimeo.
In order to solve the problems we need to have:
* institutions in place that haven’t been born yet;
* inventions that are not invented yet
John Petersen argues in his article in the conference book that rebooting the old system is not going to work. We need to plan for transition, start thinking about a new world, and don’t get emotionally involved in the daily reports of the current global erosion. Personally he thinks that if there is any one person that has the potential to at least soften this transition it is Barack Obama.
Luckily, no one in my session had read the book and they all slept well.
Just five minutes before start of the session one of the technicians came to me and asked whether I knew the history of the room that we were in. I took a closer look at this ordinary hotel-conference kind of rooms and said I didn’t have a clue. Then he told me that this room (continental c of the Chicago Hilton) was rented by Obama for two months. This was the room that he used too talk to all the potential new ministers for his government.
Obama showed us how to take new technology, a new generation and new ideas into action. The converstation society is the new oil, and like all the other utility technologies that we’ve used to increase wealth and create a better world. Let’s look at the new internet as the oil, in the new age where we move from atoms to bits. Or, as it is written ” State of the Future 2009″ :
Humanity, the built environment, and ubiquitous computing seem destined to become so interconnected that collective intelligences with “just-in-time knowledge” will emerge for improving civilization.
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