Visioning 2026 Blog
Leadership Norfolk Future Trends
The Leadership Norfolk Class was asked to pick three of the following 12 Megatrends that are going to affect our world, in preparation for next month's class. Each participant will come up with two references or 'factoids' about the trend and one quote. Please join in this exercise!
1) Energy - changing from fossil fuels to hydrogen and alternate fuels
ex: Anything into Oil
What is the Hydrogen Economy?
Quote: As Jeremy Rifikin postulates in his book The Hydrogen Economy : “A decentralized, hydrogen-energy regime offers the hope, at least, of connecting the unconnected and empowering the powerless. When that happens, we could entertain the very real possibility of "reglobalization," this time from the bottom up, and with everyone participating in the process.”
2) The Limits of Representative Democracy - Representative Democracy confronts the challenges of accelerating change.
3) Global Warming - We face an increase of 2.5 degrees F to 10.5 degrees F over the next 100 years.
4) New Diseases - Unknown viruses and resistant bacteria are emerging.
5) Changing Demographics - The differential aging and youth of the world population creates an economic and social time bomb.
6) Reduction in Biodiversity - 1/2 of existing species could be lost in the next fifty years.
7) Technological Singularity - We are approaching a moment when runaway advances outstrip human comprehension and all our knowledge and experience becomes useless as a guidepost to the future.
8) Cognitive Complexity and Continuous Innovation - Real time change requires a new way of thinking and seeing connections as the world becomes increasingly complex.
9) Clashing Civilizations and Terrorism - The confrontation of Islamic and Western cultures will create an environment of mutual anger, distrust and even hate unless new types of bridges are built.
10) Three Economies in Churn - We are in a thirty-year transition from an Industrial Economy to a Creative Knowledge Economy to an Electronic Web/Network Economy.
11) National Boarders May Disappear - As poverty confronts economic affluence, communications connect and travel expands, immigration will overpower the capacity of borders to control human migration.
12) Artificial Intelligence Emerges - The concept of what it means to be human will change as a result of the rise of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology.
New Frontier Is Called Genomics and the New Agricultural Technology Is Called Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS)
This crop revolution may succeed where GM failed
Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Biotech Century Thursday October 26, 2006The Guardian
Very interesting article that was referred from KurzweilAI.net on the new genetic engineering process for crop breading. The dialogue after the original post is very good especially by the author climbpaddlehike. Could this new technology help reduce the amount of chemicals used in the production of food crops? Is this the next step in organic farming to improve our environment and produce healthy raw materials for the food industry?
Mark
Welcome to Visioning 2026
The goal of Visioning 2026 is to start an exchange of ideas about the future of Norfolk, Madison County and surrounding areas. With that in mind we are providing this blog as a way to do that available to anyone at anytime. If you have specific questions that you want answered you can contact us at info@visioning2026.com. Hope you get involved with the process.
Visioning 2026 Committee