Big picture forecast | Jeremy Kirshbaum

Hi, everyone. Glad to be back here. I was here last year, and I'm glad to see that the beanbags have been upgraded. I was concerned about that. Always innovating. So yeah, like Robin said, I'm here from Institute for the Future. We are a global future forecasting think tank. We've been around for about 48 years. We originally spun off of the RAND Corporation. And we help people think about the future, 10 years out and more, generally in the 10 to 15 year time range, but we sometimes go out as far as 100 years and sometimes as close in as 5. So, who am I? I'm Jeremy Kirschbaum. I've been working with the Institute for a couple of years. Before that, I was working in West Africa for the better of the last years or so, mostly in Ghana and Togo and Benin, but I've been in Nigeria, and that's where my focus is currently. I bring a global cross-industry view. I look a lot at the social impacts of emerging technologies and global innovation. I'm very interested in how people make meaning, whether that's from a religious or spiritual standpoint or from a data analytics standpoint, and I'm constantly focused 10 years ahead. I'm not here to predict the future, and I'm not an expert in any specific industry. So I'm not an expert in entrepreneurship or anything like that, but I'm here to just give a broad view and talk with you a little bit about what future forecasting is, how we make a good forecast, how we think about the future at the Institute, and then dive down into what an example of a future forecast might look like, or a piece of it. Also, I really like when things are more kind of like dynamic. So if you have a question or a comment while we're going through, the point of what we do is to provoke thinking. I'm not here to like give you a body of research that we've developed necessarily. So please raise your hand throughout. And if you guys have an idea and I don't get through my whole talk, then it was a success. Like I said, the Institute for the Future is based in Palo Alto. We've been doing this for years. We're the only— there's a lot of good futurist groups. We are the only futurist group that we know of that has actually outlived its forecast. And I think that's partially because of the specific kind of forecasting that we do. We don't predict the future. We correct people if they use the word prediction. We don't think anyone can predict the future. What is the future? But we do think that it's useful to explore scenarios and think about the future. Often we forecast things that we hope don't happen. And we work with large organizations all over the world, including a lot of very large companies and large foundations, as well as with startups and individuals in a variety of different ways. So basically, we'll help anyone think about the future. better in whatever industry that they're in. This is a quick intro video from our executive director, Marina Gorbis, that I think describes really well what we do.

We're clearly living in a period of huge transformation— technological, social, economic— and while we can't know exactly what the future holds, that is, we can't predict the future, neither can we assume that today's choices and assumptions will still be relevant tomorrow. For over 40 years now, the Institute for the Future has helped governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations to make sense of the emerging trends and disruptive forces that are transforming our world. Through various types of techniques— ethnographic research, expert workshops, collaborative online forecasts, and others— we help people anticipate the discontinuities and and dilemmas that face us globally and at home so that we can ultimately make better decisions. We create maps that communicate the patterns and connections in complex systems. We also create digital artifacts that immerse us in alternative future scenarios and make them more tangible. And we use massively multiplayer online games that leverage new skills to tackle global With these and many other tools, our mission is to develop the foresight required to reveal the insights that allow for strategic action, both now and in the coming decades of disruption and uncertainty.

So as you can see, it's a very dramatic future with lots of violins in the background and Great graphics. But I think you get the gist of what we'll do. And so what I wanted to do with you, because you're not all from a specific company or industry, and because you're all on this journey to find ideas to work on and to improve yourselves in implementing those ideas, was talk— focus more on the method and more on the thinking behind what we do, and then just give you a little taste of what happens when you might dive down into a specific concept. Does that—

Great.

Does that sound good to you guys?

Yeah.

All right, good. So, big picture forecast. What's gonna happen in the next few decades? And this was developed by my mentor, Bob Johansen, who's been at the Institute for about 30 years. His original work was on the sociology of the ARPANET, and he was the first social scientist hired at the Institute and has been a leader in the futurist realm for the last few decades. His big picture forecast is that there will be more speed, frequency, scope, and scale of disruption, explosive connectivity towards distributed everything, and I'll go more into what that seemingly vague statement means, asymmetric upheaval, and blended reality, virtual and in person, will be pervasive. So as Tom Atlee says, everything is getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster. Now, I haven't been doing this for very long, but the people at the Institute who have been doing this for decades think that this next 10 years is going to be the most tumultuous that we've seen in any of our lifetimes, or in any of their lifetimes. And that's quite a big deal. I think a great representation of that is what's happening in the background here. This is an image from the Harvard Globe of Economic Complexity, which I really suggest you check out if you haven't. It's this amazing visualization of COMTRADE data done by Harvard. And every one of these dots represents $100 million of trade whipping around the world faster and faster. And I think it's, for me, just a really evocative picture of how big a scale things are moving. Also, the fact that we can take this kind of data and make it comprehensible is a really important metaphor for what's happening right now. So our forecast is that disruptions will increase dramatically. A large number of young people will lack hope and be very connected through digital media. The rich-poor gap will increase and be increasingly visible. Asymmetrical digitally enhanced terrorism will become even easier to do and harder to control. And disruption will be beyond many people's ability to cope. Many will be susceptible to simplistic solutions, especially from politicians and religion. So this last part is about how people make meaning, right? One sec. So let me talk a little bit about what's going on in this slide. We do some work with the Army War College and the National Defense University. Bob goes every year to do some classes for the future generals, and when they see this slide, they call it the red slide of death. They see this and they think ISIS. And actually, this image right here is a picture of some very young soldiers, special forces in Afghanistan, riding on 13th century wooden saddles, constantly communicating with a distant commander by satellite phone, communicating with native tribesmen who don't— neither of whom speak each other's language very well, and all the while people are trying to kill them. And this is what we mean when we say that things are going to increase in disruption. No one's trying to kill us, thank God. I don't think anyone is. I wasn't warned if there is. But we do deal, we are dealing with this scale of disruption and this intermingling of forces in whatever industry that we're in. Thank you.