2005 Ten-Year Forecast
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.
View the research perspectives and 2005 Map of the Decade to take a deeper dive.