2005 Map of the Decade [SR-910]

The future is a look around the corner, a different perspective on the place we live right now.

The perspective this year is sober. We humans are fundamentally changing the face of the earth. We are about to become a predominantly urban species, living in megacities of over 20 million inhabitants. We are altering the global climate, creating extreme variations in intensity of natural weather events. We are becoming more extreme in our political and religious views and more dependent on complex, and ultimately vulnerable, technological infrastructures.

At the same time, we're investing our time, money, and intelligence in a new degree of sociability—using new technologies to connect, cooperate, and experiment with new forms of economic organization that are much more social than transactional. These experiments are both disruptive and promising; in the end, they may be lifesavers for our species.

This 2005 Map of the Decade is a matrix of the bright and the dark, a look at six big trends and how they play out for people, places, markets, human practices, and the human toolkit. As always, we're interested in the intersections—the focal points of change.

A map, of course, is not the place. It's an abstraction. And this year, we wanted to be a little less abstract, a little more concrete. So we've added some "artifacts from the future." Think of them as trading cards from the end of the decade, something you might find in someone's hand as we turn that corner to look ahead. Pass them on to your colleagues to start them thinking. Or use them to start a group conversation. And as always, feel free to contact us if we can contribute to these conversations.